Give full marks for integrity to the Wall Street Journal for this biting report on a prisoner swap they’ve long advocated. Their own reporter, Evan Gershkovich, got released after nearly 500 days of captivity over absurd espionage charges for reporting on Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. The WSJ has every reason to paint the complicated, multi-national exchange in an entirely positive light.
And yet, the WSJ reports on the “dark figure” Putin really wanted back — an assassin held in Germany who killed one of Putin’s enemies in Berlin park five years ago, a Chechen separatist commander in exile:
Vadim Krasikov—a Russian hit man and former intelligence officer convicted of murdering an enemy of the Kremlin in a Berlin park—told a guard in the German prison where he was serving a life sentence that, “the Russian Federation will not leave me to rot in jail.”
On Thursday, that…
